India should be ashamed: Being born a girl isn't 'a crime'

[Areesh]

With his head bowed and body tensed with emotion, the father of the 23-year-old victim of the Delhi gang rape looked up and addressed the camera directly: "It is a crime to be born a woman in India." He was responding to the three-year sentence, last week, handed to the juvenile involved in the fatal attack on his daughter. Today's sentencing of the four Delhi slum dwellers convicted of her murder, one of the most shocking sexual assaults in recent Indian history, may not bring him any more comfort.

Outside the court, throughout the duration of the trial, crowds have been gathered demanding the death penalty for the remaining five attackers; Mukesh Singh, Vinay Sharma, Akshay Thakur and Pawan Gupta. The ringleader of the group, Ram Singh, never made it to trial, and was found hanging in his cell in March this year. Politicians have vowed to make rapists pay the heaviest prices; the public have declared that they will wipe out those who attack their daughters. Even the Indian chateratti, who pride themselves on their liberal values and expensive educations have been joining the clamour for blood.



The rhetoric around this case has always been volcanic. The victim was middle-class, studying to be a paramedic, and had been attacked in a decent part of town. As a result her case dominated rolling news coverage in India and spread around the world. It was a terrible, brutal attack, but it was far from unique. It wasn’t even a watershed moment in India.

If you enter those words: "It is a crime to be born a woman in India" into a basic Google search, you will get a depressing snap shot of the state of women in the country today from the very first page of results. They are the same words uttered by a woman police officer who was dragged from her car just over two weeks ago, while making her way to her sister's funeral. She was gang raped by men wielding axes in Jharkhand state in eastern India. They are also the words used last week by social activists, after a six-year-old girl, who was locked in a room and repeatedly raped by a 40-year-old man, was forced by a council of elders in Rajasthan to marry the eight-year-old son of her attacker.

“It is a crime to be born a woman in India” are words that now hang over the country. What other words would you use? In April this year, another child, a five-year-old girl from the slums of new Delhi, was kidnapped, raped and tortured by two men. The police refused to search the building she was left to die in. When she was finally found, the child had been so badly sexually mutilated, she needed an immediate colostomy. She defied expectation and survived. However, the family of the child, known only as Gudiya – or ‘little doll,’ were offered a bribe of Rs 2,000 to stop bothering the police.

Sexual violence is no stranger to Indian society. What is new, is the way in which cases like those I’ve mentioned, are being picked up by the press and talked about around the family dining table. Before the turmoil of the Delhi rape, the weight of ‘sharam’ or shame that surrounded the sexual violation of women prevented most from reporting attacks even to their families. In a country where temples are filled with effigies of goddesses, women have been blamed time and again, for violence perpetrated against them by men.

The world of entertainment has a peculiar dual personality when it comes to this kind of crime. Rape scenes have always been a mainstay of Indian cinema, the titillating moments where the public catch a glimpse of flesh in a country still prudish about kissing in public. A Punjabi hip hop song, extolling the joys of breaking into a young girl’s room and raping her, ‘Main Hoon Balatkari’ – or “I am the rapist,” attracted hordes of young fans.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/wo...e-ashamed-Being-born-a-girl-isnt-a-crime.html